John McDonald

Most artists would be delighted to find a TV news crew at their exhibition, but last week in Melbourne a Channel Ten reporter and her entourage were not allowed to film the first night of Bill Henson's new show at Tolarno Galleries. Because television reporters apparently have a God-given right to go anywhere, the indignation was predictable. The next day one report noted that "the media" were excluded from the opening.

Well, not all the media. Yours truly was there, along with about 499 other people, including the cream of Melbourne's legal and medical professions. Nobody seemed to find anything "controversial" about Henson's new photographs. It was not a cabal of perves and dilettantes but a show of force by the Melbourne establishment. Even the dinner afterwards was held at the Australia Club.

Living sculptures ... in works such as these untitled studies, Henson captures every bruise and blemish in unsettling detail.

Perhaps we're finally ready to approach this business like grown-ups. The Age asked its readers if they found Henson's work offensive and 83 per cent answered in the negative. The unsmiling Channel Ten reporter standing on the footpath in front of Tolarno Galleries spoke ominously about the artist's "trademark nude photographs of children" and mentioned "accusations of paedophilia" levelled at Henson in 2008 but there was nothing in her story that resembled news.

The tabloids have also had a go, telling us that Henson's new photographs "are sure to offend" and have already caused "alarm". But there is a notable lack of alarm this time around. It seems unlikely that we will see any repeat of the hysteria and moral panic that greeted Henson's Sydney exhibition of 2008. Even the Victorian Premier, Ted Baillieu, has come out in defence of Henson, which shows an unusual maturity for a politician. One wonders if we can expect that kind of forthrightness from Barry O'Farrell.

The current crop of Henson stories shows a media bereft of ideas, trying to create a blaze from a few dying embers of controversy. The blogs are crowded with conspiracy theorists who believe Henson is an evil genius of self-publicity who has orchestrated his own persecution to sell more photos. Then there are the amateur art critics who haven't actually seen the show but know it's "disgusting".

Art appreciation is not a science and will always be partly a matter of opinion. However, there is a need to separate fact from fiction in any discussion of Henson and his work. The most egregious idea, aside from the child pornography claims, is that Henson is deliberately courting controversy for his own profit. A publicity hound doesn't keep the TV cameras at bay or refuse to do interviews. If Henson really wanted to make some money he could begin systematically suing all the people who have slandered and libelled him. By now his lawyers must have a bulging manilla folder.

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It is a truism to say that one person's ''art'' is another's ''pornography''. We all have different thresholds of acceptability but even the most willfully offensive artists rarely cause a blip on the radar of public opinion. Over the years Henson must have realised that his pictures would prove shocking and disturbing to some people but this has never been his primary motivation. If it were the sole raison d'etre of his work, he would never have been so widely admired and reviled. He would most probably never have been noticed - which is the common fate of puerile attempts to scandalise an audience.

Despite the technical brilliance of his work, Henson is only incidentally a photographer. He is happier to discuss Mahler or Thomas Mann, Rembrandt or Caravaggio, rather than lenses and lighting. He has a grand, old-fashioned sense of art as the supreme instrument of human insight. He prefers to photograph teenagers because they have not developed the hard casings of self-esteem, social status and bad faith that we call our personalities. His young models are works in progress who are busy trying to discover who and what they are. Their nakedness and vulnerability give the photographs an immense power - frail, edgy figures emerging from an infinite darkness, revealing themselves only in fragments.

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Surely this is the very antithesis of pornography, which we see as inherently exploitative. Pornography offers its consumers a series of fantasy objects far removed from everyday life. Every viewer becomes a voyeur, whose chief pleasure lies in identifying with the active or passive side of the sexual act. The more explicit, the more outrageous, the better - because it is so much further from humdrum reality.

I find it hard to imagine viewers approaching Henson's work in this way. Stand in front of a Henson nude and study it intently for a few minutes. The effect is not titillating; it is more likely to make you conscious of your own mortality. There is something deathly about the enveloping blackness in these photos. The bodies of teenagers are transformed into living sculptures, infused with a slivery-blue sheen, every bruise and blemish captured in unsettling detail. Henson does not provide us with fantasy objects; he makes us feel how lonely it can be within our own skins.

These are disturbing images but not because they feature naked adolescents. They are disturbing because they have the beauty of old master paintings or antique statuary but depict beings of flesh and blood. They are disturbing because they touch parts of the psyche we might prefer to avoid, stripping away the social self, leaving us as defenceless as a snail without its shell. There is a degree of eros here but also a large helping of melancholy.

It is often forgotten that Henson has always juxtaposed his nudes with striking landscape studies. This time, there are only two landscapes in the show, both taken off the coast of Italy, among rugged islands that make one think of the scenery in Antonioni's 1960 film L'Avventura. Both these images are extraordinarily powerful but they need to be dramatic to stand comparison with the figure studies, and with two pictures shot in the Hermitage in St Petersburg, showing people in front of paintings by Rembrandt.

When one thinks of the huge, bland, hyper-realist images snapped in museums by contemporary German photographers, one sees Henson's humanist predilections. For him there is a living continuum between the long-dead painters and their audiences. While a photographer such as Thomas Struth makes the museum experience into something cold and clinical, for Henson it is as magical as a visit to a holy shrine. Where Struth is as sceptical as a sociologist, Henson is a true believer in the power of art.

As for the figure studies, there is an image of a girl standing on one leg, her body twisted in a way that only the mannerist painters might have imagined. There is another stooping nude, where the limbs form amazing shadows and visual echoes. There is a reclining couple, their bodies and faces animated by the merest flickers of light; a girl with a gleam in her eye and a disembodied arm that hangs, ghost-like, in the air alongside another nude. Each of these images makes one feel that the eye will never get to the end of the mysteries they embody.

The fundamental mystery is that compound of fears and desires that lead to airy but portentous concepts such as ''the human condition''. Henson finds the same feeling in Rembrandt's Prodigal Son as he does in the fleeting embrace of two anonymous teenagers. He recognises the dirty feet of Caravaggio's painted saints on his youthful models.

Henson's images have often made me think of the passage in Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, called ''Of the Despisers of the Body''', which pours scorn on the idea of a distinction between body, soul and self:

''I am body and soul'' - so speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened, the enlightened man says: I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for something in the body … Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there is a mighty lord, an unknown sage - it is called Self; it dwells in your body, it is your body.

Henson's images are testimonies to that quality Nietzsche calls the "great intelligence" of the body. In simple, mute images, unencumbered with pseudo-intellectual claptrap, they show us bodies that effortlessly conjure up thoughts of the soul and the self.

To those ''despisers of the body'', so willing to pronounce judgment on images they haven't seen, so ready to conflate nudity with pornography and see every image of a young person as a catalyst for forbidden desires, Henson's work will always pose a problem. It is important to recognise this for what it is: a minority view propagated by the guardians of everyone else's morals. The works themselves are the only response Henson need provide, and they will still be speaking to audiences when today's detractors - and admirers - are forgotten.

Bill Henson is showing at Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, until April 21.